The 4 Pillars of Learning

I have previously talked about the Principles of Learning and the Lies about Learning, but now I would like to talk about the 4 Pillars of Learning which I learned about from an amazing instructor, Andrei Neagoie. You can check out his Learning to Learn course on Udemy, which I highly recommend. You will learn so much about yourself just by taking that course.

The Pillars

Everything is a Game

For those of you who have played video games, especially role-playing games, your character levels up in certain aspects such as strength, defense, knowledge, etc as you progress throughout the game. That means that your character is learning from his/her experiences. This also applies to real life. When you spend a lot of time on something, such as coding, learning about the human body or even playing a sport, you start to get better and better at it as time goes on and you stay consistent. Your life is gameified, so you are able to level up in many different areas of your life. For example, if I am a novice cook, I start out at level 1 and cook easy dishes. Once I start getting the hang of it, I end up cooking dishes that are harder to make, and that means that my skillset is growing as a cook and I am leveling up.

Some of you may have heard about this idea of the growth mindset. The growth mindset is this idea that your brain changes as you encounter new and hard experiences. When you get stuck at learning a new concept or a new skill, that means that your brain is telling you “Hold up! I have not seen or encountered anything like this before. Let me try to make sense of it”. This is good because when you struggle with something, your brain is changing, and this is the idea of neuroplasticity, where the brain can change itself by creating new neural connections. Let’s say that you are playing basketball and you are shooting your shots at the free throw line consistently. But when you change the location of where you are shooting, the ball tends to not make it through the hoop. This is because if you have always been shooting at the free throw line, your brain will try to adjust to the position and angle at which you are at, so then you should keep practicing at different spots on the court if you want to be a good shooter. This applies to anything you learn, and you should always try to grow from your experiences and level up.

Many times, we end up doubting ourselves thinking whether or not we can achieve something, but when you encounter something hard, just remember that your brain is capable of adapting to those changes and you can get better at those skills by practicing and making sense of everything that you are learning. Remember, we as humans are always growing, and this is why we were never stuck at the infant stage. Our bodies change and grow as time goes on. When you go to the gym, and you are consistently lifting while eating a healthy diet, your body will change as you get muscular. Therefore, your brain is also capable of adapting to changes and leveling you up as you spend more time trying to get better at a particular skill.

The Feynman Technique

The Feynman Technique is this idea where you understand a concept so well that you are able to explain it to someone who has no knowledge in the field. This is definitely a challenging task, especially when you feel as though you’ve understood something, but then you may have a hard time explaining some details in an understandable way. This technique can take a while to master, and this is why studies have shown that when you teach someone how to do something, you end up retaining about 95% of that knowledge because you are actively recalling everything that you know.

In many interviews that I have had, I’ve been asked this question about how I explain technical concepts to people who are non-technical, and the answer I have always said is that I try to make analogies with common things that everyone can relate to, and then they are able to make sense of it pretty quickly. When I am able to relate a technical concept to something in real life, then I know that I fully understand what I am learning about. If I have just a little bit of a gap in my knowledge for a particular concept, I know that I won’t be able to explain it in an understandable way to someone else. Every time you learn something, try to explain it to someone who isn’t familiar with the topic, such as a family member or a friend. You can even try to explain a concept to an inanimate object such as a rubber duck just to hear yourself.

Trunk-Based Knowledge

The idea of trunk-based knowledge is that everything you learn starts from the roots, such as the fundamentals and principles, and then you start to have more branches and leaves that grow as your knowledge increases. You have to make connections with everything that you learn, otherwise you won’t be able to learn a concept or skill that builds off of a previous one. I can give an example of trunk-based knowledge.

As a Software Engineer, I always try to make sense of everything that I learn. If I don’t even know the basics of programming, how can I accomplish my job? I have to know what programming is, why we have so many programming languages, what differentiates one language from another, how the code files speak to computers and so on. Even though I may not be asked about these in an interview, I know that it’s something that would benefit me in the long run because if I don’t make those connections, I will have a hard time learning new concepts. You can’t teach an infant how to run if that infant can’t even crawl. How do you expect to do Algebra if your basic math skills are lacking? Therefore, you have to make sure that you understand the principles and the previous topics before you move on to the next concept.

You should always be able to answer the question “why?” when you are learning something. The principles and fundamentals will always last a long time. When you have those grounded, you will be able to learn new concepts in a much more understandable way.

Efficiency Trumps Grit

This idea of being the hardest worker in order to get good at something isn’t entirely true. Efficiency is key! You don’t want to spend too long on something only to figure out that there was a more efficient way to do it. You want to use the right strategies and methods in order to get good at a particular skill. Let’s talk about the Pareto Principle for example, where it’s this idea that you can get 80% of the results with 20% of the input. When you are learning a new language, you may work hard and spend hours trying to memorize every word or phrase in that language, but instead you could be learning the words and phrases that are used 80% of the time. The 80/20 rule is not a hard-and-fast rule, but you get the picture that you don’t have to learn every single thing about a topic in order to get really good at it. Even in programming, many new programmers assume that they have to memorize so many words in order to program, but you just need to learn a fraction of what the programming language contains in order to excel at it. Once you master the fundamentals, you will be able to pick up on things very quickly.

In our society today, we think that if someone is always busy, that he/she is always very productive, but in fact the opposite is true. Being too busy equates to poor time management skills, because you want to make the most out of your time to do other things, such as spending time with friends and family, going outside, traveling, exercising and so on. Doing these activities actually allows your brain to learn new concepts faster, as your brain is in the diffuse mode. I will go over the different learning techniques in a future article, but for now I thought I should mention this one.

The pillars are the key to having a growth mindset and understanding how to grow your knowledge a much more efficient way.

Thank you so much for reading!